If you’ve ever caught an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, the TV series that profiles rock bands and personalities, you may agree with me that it can be fascinating. I especially like the interviews about the creative process. I’ve learned that great songs can come from just about anywhere. And that a talented group of people working together can produce amazing results.

When it comes to our Secure Data Center for the Enterprise Portfolio CVDs (Cisco Validated Designs), that’s exactly what happened. We just released the fourth CVD: Threat Management with NextGen IPS, which focuses on giving you a full set of capabilities for a threat management system. But it’s also aware that the data center has to remain efficient and support other business goals while it’s defending against cyber attacks.Read More »

As a Cloud Architect, I’ve had the privilege to work with CTOs and CIOs across the globe to uncover the key factors driving Business Continuity and Workload Mobility across their cloud infrastructures. We’ve worked with enterprises, large and small, and service providers to answer their top five concerns in our new Business Continuity and Workload Mobility solution for the Private Cloud.

1) Can you provide business continuity, workload mobility, and disaster recovery for my unique mix of applications, with lower infrastructure costs and less complexity for my operations teams? Yes.

2) Can you provide a multi-site design that reduces business outages and costly downtime, allowing my critical applications to be more secure and available? Yes.

A Proven Multi-site Design, Built on the Most Widely Deployed Cloud Infrastructure

We addressed each of these pain points as we designed, built, and validated our new multi-site business continuity and workload mobility solution. Our multi-site solution is built upon Cisco’s cloud foundation, the Virtual Multi-service Data Center (VMDC) that’s been deployed at hundreds of the world’s top enterprises and service providers. In our latest VMDC release, we’ve extended our cloud design to support multi-site topologies and critical use cases for private cloud customers. This validated design simply connects regional and long-distance data centers within your private cloud to address some critical IT functions, including:

The VMDC Business Continuity and Workload Mobility solution (CVD Design Guide) is grounded in the reality of today’s cloud environment, providing different design choices that match your applications needs. We realize there is no “one size fits all” cloud design, that’s why we support both physical and virtual resources, multiple hypervisors and storage choices, and security compliant designs with industry certifications like FISMA, PCI, and HIPPA.

Key Factors Driving Business Continuity and Workload Mobility in the Private CloudRead More »

Organizations are moving from just dealing with bring your own device (BYOD) and the influx of mobile devices to proactively developing solutions that use the full power of mobility. Because of the complexities and fluid technology horizon, this is often simpler said than done. Now you can simplify and accelerate your mobility projects by deploying a comprehensive mobility solution that has been tested and validated end to end. Read More »

The news of high-profile targeted data center attacks has dominated security news recently. But data center attacks are even more prevalent than those headlines suggest. In fact, a survey conducted last summer by Network World suggests that 67 percent of data center administrators experienced downtime due to malware and related attacks in the previous 12 months.

A key challenge is that many of today’s security solutions are simply not designed for the data center, with limitations in both provisioning and performance. The situation will likely get worse before it gets better as data center traffic grows exponentially and data centers migrate from physical, to virtual, to next-generation environments like Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Application Centric Infrastructures (ACI).

Enterprises across the globe have been asking for simpler ways to provide multi-site Business Continuity and Workload Mobility for applications hosted in their Private Cloud. The Cloud promises a more agile operational environment and that promise has been fulfilled to a large extent within their data centers. But many Enterprises are challenged to unlock this same agility across multi-site Cloud topologies. For example, Enterprise CTOs and CIOs have asked us directly to provide simplified Workload Mobility of critical apps between sites to give their operations teams more flexibility.

Many competitive solutions offer basic VM mobility between sites and storage replication, but do not address the rest of the application environment including: security, stateful services, network containers, tenancy, and most importantly both physical and virtual resources.

What good does it do to move a VM to a new site if the rest of the application environment is left behind causing a potential security hole?

How to move a LIVE 3-tier app like Microsoft SharePoint to a new site (without impacting users)

As we all know, business critical applications require a robust service environment to operate securely across the cloud. In our example below, the application environment provides firewall and load balancing services for each tier of the SharePoint application; web, app, and database tiers. These services are stitched together using a secure Network Container that carve out a slice of resources across the data center for SharePoint. Most Enterprises and SPs use a mix of physical and virtual resources including firewalls, load balancers, VPN termination, IDS, and network switching. Many of these services create stateful connections to users, so….

If you perform a live migration of SharePoint to a new site, stateful connections to firewalls and load balancers need to be preserved to maintain security and TCP connections to active users.

Broken user connections = Service disruption (that’s not good)

You must also provide identical security and services for new SharePoint users even though the application has moved to a new site.

Broken Network Services = Potential Security hole (that’s even worse)

How does Next-Gen Workload Mobility actually work?

Let’s share some test results from our new Business Continuity and Workload Mobility Solutionto illustrate how we performed live SharePoint migrations to a new site (75 km away) while maintaining security, stateful services, and user connections. Oh yes, automatically without manual intervention.

We first deployed the SharePoint Web, App, and Database tiers in a secure network container in Data Center 1 using service orchestration, simple and easy. Refer to the figure below for a topology picture.

SharePoint Web Tier is in a Public Zone, and uses a virtual firewall (VSG) and Citrix load balancer

SharePoint App Tier and Database Tier (SQL) are in a Protected Zone and use an ASA Firewall and Citrix load balancer

We performed a Live vMotion of SharePoint (Web, App, Database) to new hosts in Data Center 2, described in the figure below. Data Center 2 is 75 km away. Our SharePoint migration had minimal disruption (2 seconds or less) and maintained security, stateful services, and all user connections across our multi-site Cloud. Pretty sweet! A few highlights from our validated design are provided below.

Our virtual switch (Nexus 1000v), virtual firewall (VSG), and UCS automatically updated Port and Security Profiles at the new site, so our virtual switching and application firewalls were preserved without lifting a finger.

Our Network Container was automatically extended between Metro sites, maintaining security, tenancy, QoS, IP addressing, and user connections. SharePoint was discovered on the new host in Data Center 2 within seconds, using this extended Network Container.

Now let’s move the rest of the network container to Data Center 2 in less than one second!

Step 2: Redirect users to a new Network Container in Data Center 2….in less than 1 second!

With the aid of service orchestration, we simply created a new network container in Data Center 2. This new container included the same configuration, connections, and services (firewalls, load balancers) as the original container in Data Center 1. Once created, we simply redirected external users to the SharePoint application running in Data Center 2, as described below. The redirection of users happened in less than one second, pretty amazing. A simple routing update delivered through service orchestration performed the redirection. In this step, user connections were broken and new connections were re-established to the already running SharePoint application in less than one second! A few highlights from our validated design are provided below.

Layer 2 Extensions allowed the preservation of IP Addressing for Apps and Services during migration. There is no need to “re-IP” your applications just because they’ve moved to a different city.

The complete Network Container including physical and virtual resources was moved with minimal disruption (sub-second) to users

Our Multi-site Cloud solution supports a typical application environment, including both physical and virtual resources, with scaling for large and small private clouds

We also support Cold workload moves of less critical workloads that don’t require these stringent stateful requirements.

For More Info:

We encourage you to follow my blog series and check out our new business continuity and workload mobility solution (VMDC DCI), which describes key business drivers, Cisco DCI innovations, and validated designs that our customers are deploying in their private clouds.

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